They're Never Full For Long

©2001 Clay Johnson
All rights reserved.

I've never realized how much the keys on an old typewriter look like the crooked, jutting teeth of a Neanderthal cartoon character. The humped shape of the ancient Remington I have sitting on my desk even resembles the Cro-Magnon brow, and the strange metal odds and ends that stick out everywhere and perform forgotten functions could easily be pictured as unruly strands of bonded hair. Cave head. The picture would be complete if only the keys were nicotine yellow instead of black and white. I find it an unsettling image.

No. I don't really, but I find myself latching onto any available thought, any thought I can find that will delay me from typing that first sentence. That sentence sure to shatter any illusions of greatness I have for myself. As long as I sit here in my makeshift office, created around a Wal-Mart pasteboard desk and bargain-bin special collectors edition hardback reprints of selected classics, staring at a faded black Remington noiseless (purchased on sale from Ned's Antique Emporium) and the blank sheet of paper it holds—as long as I have the unused and uncrumpled stack of Southworth Parchment paper resting at the corner of the desk—then I can still be Hemingway. I am still James Joyce. I am Thomas Wolfe. Shirley Jackson is sitting in this chair. I might carve Shakespeare was here in my desktop. I might, I will, I am.

Then I type out that first sentence. In my halting, clumsy hunt-and-peck, I sully that glowing peach parchment with spotty black ink and become Stanley "Nobody" Waters. I haven't actually done it yet, but I can see it like I have. In that instant the chip in the side of the desk from my errant hammer during its assembly, the Martha Stewart emblem on the bottom of my "Vintage office" paperweight, the chicken scratch autograph of poop! that some child so kindly carved into the side of the typewriter—they all become visible. That first sentence is daunting. That first sentence is death

But no need for worry. Even if I weren't sweating through my shirt at the thought of annihilating my self-image, I couldn't come up with the death knell sentence. My mind is blank. I have post-it notes of various excellent ideas plastered all over the shelf beside me. Woman goes to pick up birthday cake for son and can't decide if she wants vanilla or chocolate frosting ... Old man plays checkers by himself ... Woman works with men building a skyscraper, and thinks she's lucky ... Busy mechanic decides to finally do the shopping for his elderly neighbor ... Boy buys lollipop and pets a dog, etc.

I have a stack of The New Yorker at my feet and a life's worth of memories to draw on, but nothing comes out. This is the state of "empty" that all Zen meditations aspire to. A slate only wishes it were this blank.

Yesterday I knew the sentence. I could see it flashing in green neon behind my eyes; I just couldn't bring myself to put it to paper. Today? Nothing.

I think I know what my problem is. During breakfast I watched an episode of The Twilight Zone because it was early and nothing else was on. It showed a preview for The Matrix on DVD and a special club that you join to get Stephen King's books at half price. Now the left half of my brain is in shambles. These vacuums of imagination have anesthetized me. The word genre has invaded my mind like HIV and lowered the count of my creative brain cells to unfathomable levels. I can extract nothing but werewolves and conspiracy plots and the faint, nagging question What if...? It jackhammers around up there with the insistence of a faucet dripping in the night. I know I shouldn't give it a second thought. I know I shouldn't even be able to hear it, but I can. And the result is streams of ludicrous plot twists and convolutions.

In matters of What if...? my mind is not blank. I could expound on story lines stemming from that question all day, but then, so could my laundry. I'm trying to write here. I'm trying to create art. But when I attempt to do just that my mind clears like a fog being sucked from a vale.

The worst is threatening. The blank parchment is staring up at me, waiting. Impatience and fear are threatening to obliterate me. I won't even be lucky enough to become Stanley "Nobody" Waters. I will burn in imagination Hell as Stan-the-man "Popular Fiction" Waters. I will be forced to use the complex 454 Chevy V8 of thought in my head for what my sweat socks could do just fine. I am one fateful keystroke away from it.

And I am saved. There is a knock at my door. I groan, because I know who it is, and for a moment I don't know which is worse, but the words "superb thriller!" flash past my eyes and I leap away from the Remington like it's a coiled rattlesnake, knocking over my chair in the process. I almost slip on the linoleum as I run to the door, but I catch myself on the kitchen counter and make it without a bruise.

It's Mrs. Cartwright, my neighbor. She can't stand silence. It makes her feel like she has spiders crawling all over her body. Late at night I hear a low thumping radiate from her apartment. Some people can sleep with their eyes open. Mrs. Cartwright can sleep while her hand keeps 4/4 time on the floor with a broomstick. I say hello and ask her how she is.

She studies me through her bifocals, her eyes squinting to twin wrinkles, and says, "You're being too quiet. I came to make sure you weren't dead."

"I'm not dead. Thank you."

"I can see."

"I just needed quiet so I could write. I'm working on a novel."

"Horror stories!" she says, and then spits on my floor. I have to move my foot to avoid the saliva missile.

"No, real stories," I tell her.

"Imagine that," she says, and elbows past me, "Let me read."

"Actually, there isn't anything to read. It's still just a lot of blank paper."

"A novel full of nothing?"

"So far."

"Sounds like horror to me. Seems like it's all folks are writing these days." She pauses, looks like she's lost her train of thought, and then she blinks. "You need noise; it'll help you think."

"No. Noise is the one thing I don't need. I can't think when it's too loud."

"Really?" She sounds like I just tried to tell her I believe Buddy Holly was British prime minister during World War II, but her eyes are doing something else; all the while she's scratching absently at her ear. I notice for the first time how much her hands resemble lobster claws. The skin on her arms, neck, and face is so white that it is almost clear. The veins are visible beneath the wax-paper gloss of the epidermis, but her hands are bright red, like she held them in a pot of boiling water for five minutes before knocking on my door. She also has a habit of not separating her fingers. She doesn't splay them and make silly gestures when she talks, like most people. Everything is a pincer motion with her, and I'm starting to realize that not only does she irritate me—make my back itch like I'm standing on an ant pile during a moment of silence at a funeral—but she really gives me the creeps.

It isn't so much the hands, though they play a big part in it. Mostly it's the way she squints when she looks at me, the way she always seems to be staring at my soul. Not like a mother, not like she can see when I lie, or like she's even trying to, but more as if she's studying it the way your average weekend backyard barbecue-chef studies a steak he's just cut.

She's doing it right now, while she pinches her ear between her thumb and keeps the other four fingers scrunched together, rubbing up and down (playing the world's smallest violin, her version of scratching) and trying to understand how anyone can think better without noise. She's squinting, trying to see if my soul is, in fact, done and ready to eat.

She rotates her pincer and inserts her thumb into the ear canal to root. Her eyes flare for a split second, and then they're back to that piercing squint. I'm not even sure I really saw it. She arches an eyebrow and then gives a quick, "Hmph," and heads toward my desk to inspect my work area and catch a glimpse of the new novel. I find myself hoping that her squinting, "How would you like your steak?" gaze doesn't decide my first page is lunch material.

"There's nothing here!" she says, motioning with her left claw (open-close, open-close), and then her eyes are back on my novel-to-be. Poking it with a fork to see if it rises.

The sheet is blank, I know, but symbolism and superstition run deep in this neck of the woods, and I'm afraid that if something happens to that empty peach sheet—if it gets torn, thrown away, or is broken down and passes through some old lady's colon—then I'll never conjure another word. It won't just be fear that is keeping me from climbing into an illustrated portrait on the wall of a Lit 221 classroom.

"I know. That's what I was trying to tell you back at the door. I haven't gotten anything done today."

"Haven't you?" she asks. She isn't looking at me when she says this. She is bent over the back of the typewriter, I think trying to see something behind it, but then she closes her eyes and inhales through her nose like a cook sampling the bouquet of his family's recipe for spaghetti sauce.

"Umm, excuse me!" I say, sliding a hand between her nose and the Remington, trying to pull it a little farther from her and a little closer to me, "But I really have to get back to work. As you can see, I'm a little behind."

She straightens, slowly, bringing her face within inches of mine, short slight breaths coming out of her mouth in excited pants. "I would have to agree, Mr. Waters." She winks at me and her eyes are red. Not the bright fire-engine red of comic book and movie demons, or the neon-flame red of an open sign on a sports bar, but good old-fashioned, blood red. It looks as if both of her eyes have hemorrhaged completely, leaving no whites and no discernable color in the iris. The rings between the iris and the pupil stick out just barely, though, through the bloody orbs that are almost black, giving them the appearance of fish eyes.

Why have I never noticed this before? At least when I answered the door? Am I always so irritated, so eager to get rid of her, that I never make eye contact? Never even direct my attention her way?

The answer is simple enough. She squints. She squints and I look away. She squints and it hides her eyeballs. She squints and it makes me uncomfortable.

Her eyes are wide open now, though. Her gaze is boring into mine; I see the faint lines inside the blood flit left to right, jittering. They never stop. It's causing gentle ripples in the red, and I don't know if that is only my imagination, but it makes my eyes hurt all the same.

"Do you need any Visine?" I ask, releasing my hold on the typewriter and stepping back, "I have some in the bathroom. I can get—"

"No." She sounds like she wants to say something else, but she doesn't. She cocks her head to the side, listening, one eye half closed—severe crow's feet at the corner—the other wide open.

"It doesn't hurt," she finishes.

"Okay. I ... I really need to get back to work."

"Shh." She puts one claw in front of her lips and wipes her open eye with the other. She doesn't even flinch, and her fingertip comes away bloody. "May I have a glass of water?" she asks, her face still slightly upturned, a smile playing around her mouth.

"S-sure." I go into the kitchen and a fill a paper cup with tap water. Behind me she's started humming. At least, I think it's humming. The noise, kind of like a buzz, has weird spaces in it, and it's off rhythm. The hum sounds like the broken song a child might come up with on a long car trip, but there's something more familiar about it, something I can't quite place—like the theme song to a TV show I never watch, but somehow know.

When I turn back with her water, her head is still cocked at that odd angle, only now both of her eyes are closed and her face has relaxed into an expression of simple bliss. The smile has arrived on her lips and I see where the hum is coming from, though I don't understand how I can hear it from where I'm standing, how I could hear it just fine with the sink running.

Mrs. Cartwright is wearing green corduroy pants, and her left hand is hanging by her thigh, scratching the material to the beat of some invisible set of personal sheet music. The gentle breeze of corduroy-Bach (or is it Three's Company?) floats across the room to me, and I feel strangely relaxed. I don't even realize that I've placed her water on the counter and taken a seat on the linoleum, Indian style, until her fingers freeze and she straightens her head. Her eyes pop open and a thin cloud of blood mists into the air in front of them. At the sight a spark fires off in my brain and I jerk back to reality, hitting my elbow on the brass knobs of the cupboard beside me.

"Ah!"

"I don't get my water?" She aims her bloody stare down in my direction. Her eyes are leaking onto her cheek now.

"Right here," I say, trying to unfold my legs, stand up, and rub my elbow all at the same time. I manage, but just barely. I fall to the side once and almost collide with the edge of the counter before I'm up and righted. "Sorry; I don't know what happened. One minute I had the cup in my hand and I was bringing it over, and the next ... I don't know."

"I think I know what you mean," she tells me, and as she reaches for the cup I see that her hand actually is a claw now. Just her right one. It no longer has four fingers curled together. They have become one meaty lump, and her thumb is thicker, the fingernail almost nonexistent, it's buried under so much flesh.

I'm sure it wasn't like that before. I saw her motion with it. I saw her pick at herself with it. She didn't have a claw; she just acted like she did. I know this because—

My mind goes momentarily blank as she brings the lip of the cup to her ear and tilts it. Water leaks down the side of her neck and she closes her eyes again in that look of divine pleasure. This wouldn't be so bad. This would be something I could accept—perhaps she has an earache, and water cures it. I could deal with this, if it weren't for the slurping sounds that are coming from the side of her head. From the direction of her ear, to be exact.

"Okay—" I begin.

She lets go of the cup and it falls to the floor, the last few drops spilling onto my carpet.

"I ne—"

She drops her claw back down to the side of her pants and opens her eyes. That red mist again.

"Y—"

And then her ear belches. It honest-to-God cuts one that rips through the afternoon silence of my apartment like an ass explosion after an all-you-can-eat beanfest.

"You need to leave!"

I don't even see her start scratching again, but she must have, because my brain starts doing that foggy thing again and everything fades.

When the fog leaves, it does so quickly, and it does so to pain.

I burn my hand. It makes sense. That's what happens when you touch the glowing black handle of a furnace door without wearing gloves. The searing pain and the smell of my own flesh sautˇing wake me from wherever I was like a gunshot during a light doze. I jerk my hand away and backpedal, tripping on a half-empty pack of coal and landing on my ass with a heavy whap!

The first thing I grasp is that I am screaming. The second is that the screaming isn't doing much to block out the sound of the Mrs. Cartwright thing that stands beside me scratching Beethoven's cover of the Laverne and Shirley theme on her corduroy pants. And she is a thing. She's stepping between me and the furnace, and her hand really is a claw now, complete with burnt red shell and sharp edges. Both of her eyes are sending a continuous stream of blood down her cheeks and she has a mouth in the side of her head where her ear used to be. Long rectangular teeth, a lot like the Neanderthal choppers I envisioned my Remington possessing, jut from the mouth at various angles. Thick rivers of saliva flow between the crusty ivories and slither onto her shoulder, which is growing some sort of scaly horn.

She aims her left hand at me, a hand that has begun the transformation and looks like one of those wax hands with the wicks in the fingers that is half melted. She continues the turntable version of The Facts of Life on her leg with the other claw.

"Get up, Mr. Waters. You have something you were going to do for me, and you haven't finished."

The pain in my palm has faded to a screaming sting and I think I can almost ignore it, and there is something in her voice, weaving in and out like the mellow tones of the saxophone on a Kenny G song. It's like the promise of candy, and suddenly my hand feels better; in fact, it doesn't hurt at all, so I turn it over and place it palm down on the cold concrete floor and try to get to my feet.

The pain returns with a vengeance and the scratching on her leg is partially blocked out by another scream. My eyes tear up and blur the view. As I blink to clear them away, I feel like I've had two beers and am trying to decide if I'm drunk or not.

Mrs. Cartwright is much shorter now. One of her legs has ballooned to nearly twice its former width, and the other looks like a cane made from two sticks tied together that is about to break.

"Get up!" she says, and I can see that the furnace door behind her is roughly nine feet tall and reaches from floor to ceiling. Who needs a walk-in furnace? Especially in an apartment building, as I can only assume we are in the basement.

"I—"

"Now! There isn't much time."

"But I—"

"Please?" She leans forward as she says this and places both claws on her oddly matched knees. It has to be the sickest thing I've ever heard. The mellow tones that slid between her words, even when she was yelling, are gone, replaced by nothing but empty need. I think this is what it sounds like when a child molester calls some kid on a playground, trying to convince him to come to the fence.

"No! I—"

She starts the scratching again, and the two-beers feeling returns. I see two naked women dancing in the flames of the furnace, beckoning me in with waving arms, wrists adorned with miniature rose garlands. Hostesses at a party in Hell. And behind them I see a long black table, waiters with heads where their left arms should be and long cracking beaks where their heads should be. The beaks snap straight up into the air, and I hear what sounds like, "Seconds, anyone?"

And then from the floor in front of me comes, "They're never full for long."

I try to move my head through the soup feeling, the fog that's returning, and in the right-hand corner, just beyond the door of the furnace, I see the remains of Ernie from the second floor. His exposed bones and torn muscles crackle in the flames. He's arranged like a pile of clothes dumped from a plastic bag, his barely recognizable head balanced at an angle on top. When he opens his mouth he speaks in a rasp and blood slides down his chin.

I remember when he welcomed me to the building, a cherub-faced little man grinning like it was Christmas as he shook my hand. He had a deep voice then, and he said, "I like meeting new people. Love new people. And kids. You got kids?" He seemed nervous then. Now all he seems is dead. And eaten. And all he says is, "They're never full for long."

A month ago we stood beside the mailbox in the lobby, watching Mrs. Cartwright stroll past. She was wearing pastels then, and she didn't have a mouth in her ear. Ernie said she threw parties. "Dinner parties, with marvelous foreign food. Exotic stuff no one's ever had," he said, "Pretty amazing. Gotta be. I've seen her lead her guests through the lobby here. They have a dazed look, like star struck." For a second or two he wore that look, and then he said, "Must be somethin'. Keeps 'em late, too. Never see folks leave. I asked her once. I asked her if the food was good. She said it must be, because they're never full for long." Ernie looked at me then, and he looked at me with the same nervous twitch he vibrated with when I first met him, and he said, "You think she'll invite one of us someday?"

Something touches my shoulder and I can almost feel my skin ripple as it shies away. Nausea slams into me and I try to scuttle back in one of those crab walks we used to do in grammar school, but I'm rooted to the spot. The soup haze that's thickening my head won't leave, and it feels like split pea, which only adds to the nausea. Mrs. Cartwright steps into my line of sight, her claw reaching to me, and I realize I've been staring at Ernie's remains.

"Please," she says again, more of a statement than a plea, and the silkiness is back in her voice. This demon thing that eats people. She has a silken voice. Or is she just the delivery girl?

She sounds like a movie starlet. I don't know which one; maybe it's just what I think a beautiful starlet would sound like in any one of my fantasies, but the voice comes out in stereo from both of her mouths, and as I try to get up I discover that I have an erection.

The revulsion I experienced during her first "please" rushes back to me, and I slam my burned hand onto the floor. The movement, and the shriek of agony it brings, shocks the Mrs. Cartwright thing and she takes a step back. She slips on a small pile of coal and puts all of her weight on the stick-cane leg, and it snaps like the twig it seems to be.

With a surprised Whoop! she falls through the opening and into the walk-in furnace. As the twig leg breaks and her fat leg flips into the air, I see that she is starting to grow a tail. It's the first thing to catch fire.

The two naked women pop like water balloons and drench The Mrs. Cartwright Thing in a yellow vomitous goop that explodes in flames as it hits her, causing a chorus of wails that sounds like slaughtered dolphins. Her face implodes and more of the yellow goop floods out into the cast-iron hell-pot.

I scramble to my feet and pick up a greasy green scrim rag. My neighbor's screaming echoes inside the furnace as I use the rag to take hold of the door's handle. Instantly the yowl of pain and fury changes and something invisible, but wrapped in the smoke from the burning yellow goop, comes shooting at me. It has mismatched wings and a forked tail the length of three men. Its head looks like a beaver with the lower jaw of a crocodile, and its body is like a skeleton that has been crushed by a safe and glued back together by a three-year-old.

I put all of my weight into it, and as the door swings shut an arm, smoky gray, almost transparent, and ending in a lobster claw, flies around the edge and grabs my wrist. Its entrance is accompanied by the return of the scratching corduroy hum, and for just an instant I want to release the door. Then I drop the rag and latch onto the handle with my bare hand. My scream, strained through my clenched jaw, mixes with the chorus coming from inside the furnace, and the hum relents. The heavy iron door slams shut on the arm and the smoke vanishes. The invisible appendage pops, and a flood of yellow drops to the floor smelling of sulfur and hot dogs.

The basement is back to normal. Once shut, the door to the furnace was once again no more than one foot by two. I find a key steaming on the floor in front of the coal pile Mrs. Cartwright slipped on. I can only assume it is to her apartment. I use it to go in and make sure her lights are off, and then I use my sleeve to wipe down the doorknob. On her table is a pile of keys. Just like hers. Just like mine.

I never took the time to notice the quiet. I suppose she made so much noise that I just assumed it was coming from the other apartments, as well.

I'm sitting in front of the old Remington again, all those good ideas hanging from the shelf in front of me. My old college fiction manual is sitting beside me open to page one. It says write what you know. All I know is that my hand is killing me and I still can't think of anything.

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